Brown changed the way we interact

Because if you are a woman, she changed your life with work, with men.

If you are a man, she changed your relationship with women.

Simply put, she made a difference.

She wrote "Sex and the Single Girl" in 1962, then helmed Cosmopolitan magazine and turned it into a guidebook for women's sex and sexuality for 32 years.

She transformed Betty Friedan's "Feminine Mystique" into the reality of women's liberation.

I'm not really sure I got that liberation thing until the late 1970s. I mean, I was a stay-at-home mom with three little kids. Who had time for anything else?

Then my old newspaper editor sought to rehire me and my first question was "Are you offering me a man's pay?" I realized I felt equal because of Brown and all the other feminists of the 1960s.

A decade earlier – when Brown first came on the scene – her influence was far from universal. We still took a back seat to men in the business world.

When I was seeking my first newspaper job in the 1960s, the editor who hired me had said, "We'll be paying you $10 a week less than if you were a man, because someone will take you out to dinner once a week." And I accepted that.

I made $50 a week and my dad sent me $10 until I got a raise.

Helen Gurley Brown changed all that for me and all other women.

Almost 20 years ago, when I last interviewed Brown, she didn't want to talk about women's workplace issues. She had just written "The Late Show, a Semi Wild but Practical Survival Plan for Women Over 50," and she was totally focused on sex. And men. And catching them. And keeping them, if that's what you wanted.

She met me at the door to her Beverly Wilshire Hotel suite wearing nothing but a man's shirt. Her hair, I wrote at the time, "looked like a tumbleweed – one that had bounced Route 66 between Albuquerque and Tucumcari. Grease slathered her face – taut as a tom-tom thanks to plastic surgeries.

"The editor of Cosmopolitan magazine, a woman totally preoccupied with eternal youth, has lost the battle."

She was still trumpeting her philosophy, I wrote. A Cosmo girl, she told me, "loves men and children, is traditional in many ways, but wants her own identity."

She added she considers herself "a devout feminist but the feminist movement sometimes denigrates men and, well, after all ... I knew early in my dating years that men have problems, too."

As they age, women have it easy in the sex department, she said. She admitted to taking massive amounts of estrogen to protect her libido and added, "We can always perform like little minxes. They, poor dears, have those performance problems and it's all tied up with their egos."

And she added: "To grow old is disgraceful. You must fight back." Age can turn you into a boring, whiney, unhealthy person – not someone a Cosmo boy wants to hang out with.

Then Brown acknowledged you can't help growing older, but you can keep yourself from growing old.

User Agreement

Keep it civil and stay on topic. No profanity, vulgarity, racial
slurs or personal attacks. People who harass others or joke about
tragedies will be blocked. By posting your comment, you agree to
allow Orange County Register Communications, Inc. the right to
republish your name and comment in additional Register publications
without any notification or payment.